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AroSpecAwarenessWeek: Day 7 – Reflection

Saturday, February 25: Reflect on your week, your experience as identifying as aromantic or arospec. What would you like for next year’s week? What are some final things you want to express about being a part of the aromantic/aromantic spectrum community or other things you’d like people to know?

I can’t believe this week is already over. I feel like even with this week I’ve learned to love my aromanticism more than I did before. I was able to share things that played at the back of my mind and it became freeing.

I wouldn’t change being aromantic for the world, it is who I am and everything I’ve talked about during this week through here or on twitter has made me who I am today. I am stronger because of it. Of course there are stages of my life that I would probably change but if I didn’t experience them the way I did, if I didn’t find out about aromanticism until later in life I probably wouldn’t be so motivated to educate people and share my story on it.

I feel like the last thing I should do for this week is destroy some aromantic myths because I know there’s probably a lot out there. So here’s a few:

Not all aromantic people are also asexual. There are allosexual aromantics.

Aromantic people can date, if they want to.

Not all aromantic people are romance repulsed

Not everyone’s aromantic discovery is the same.

Aromantic people aren’t straight, unless that’s how they’d like to identify

“Cishet” aros are not your enemy. They are people who are also trying to accept who they are too.

Honestly becoming more active in the aromantic community has allowed me to talk to some of the nicest people I’ve probably ever spoken to, they’ve made me feel so accepted within the community and it’s just a wonderful thing knowing that there are people out there who are exactly like you, who have experienced similar things to you, and who are also fighting for this world to change.

I also want to bring up the topic that I’ve noticed a lot of people in fandoms who would rather accept a character as asexual than aromantic. And that’s a very harmful way to think if I’m going to be honest. The aromantic community has little to no representation so when we do have it (Jughead Jones for example) we cling to it. And by denying our aromantic headcanons and/or our canon aromantic characters and shipping them with someone you are telling the aromantic community that they need love to fix them. That romantic love is the endgame for every person. The sad thing is that all of the aromantic headcanons that I see nowadays are either characters who are “too smart” for romance (Sherlock for example) or not human (Castiel for example). And the sad and annoying thing is all of the characters I’ve seen as aro coded have been forced into relationships and suddenly the characters are seen as “fixed”. And it’s so harmful. Let characters be aromantic because spoiler alert people are aromantic.

What would I like to see for next years week? Honestly I have no idea. I would like to talk about in more depth canon aromantic characters, and/or aro coded characters, and how finding a canon aromantic character made me/the community feel as we finally got representation. Maybe we could even reflect on arospecawarenessweek this year to next year when it comes around, to see how much things have changed for ourselves and for the way the world views aromanticism, and relationships, as well as if there’s any aromantic characters on-screen yet.

I do hope in a years time there’s at least one canonically on-screen aromantic character who has used the word aromantic to describe themselves. One can dream.